Stellaria

I think it was more that he wasn't prepared for the sheer volume of beginners that happened to be in that session. I'm sure his format works spectacularly when there's a couple beginners and 4-6 more experienced participants....but we had 6 beginners, and about half did not catch on to much of anything very quickly and required constant babysitting. One of the pitfalls of running an "any experience level" group, I suppose.

I've only been working with clay as an adult for about 7 months, starting with an open studio type class in September. I came to that with the experience of three high school ceramics classes taken 20-some years prior. My expectations of the open studio did not match reality, as I didn't quite realize how much I did know already, how much other beginners DIDN'T know, and how much of the instructor's time would be taken up by the participants with zero experience. I figured we'd be getting more demonstrations each session, but the format was geared more toward just making what you want to make. It was really up to me, being more determined to learn a specific skill (wheel,) to research techniques and just get in and practice. When I was in high school, I was allowed to "fall back" on hand building when throwing didn't come easily. That kind of makes me mad now. Throwing ISN'T EASY, and I wish someone had pushed me a little harder then. The only part of that experience that I am grateful for now is that it gave me some drive to not just give up and take the easy route this time around. Yeah, I could be making press-molded slab plates like everyone else in my open studio group, but that's not the pieces I want. But I'm the one that has to push myself to get the practice in, because our instructor won't do that. I do rely on YouTube almost exclusively for learning techniques, troubleshooting, and learning new forms. It's not a bad thing. I watch videos on single subjects from a variety of potters, and play around to see what works best for me. In that way, I was able to set my own "curriculum" while still creating functional ware that I didn't have to just pitch out because I wasn't "getting" everything all at once. For example, I tried trimming a pot the second week of class, and felt WAY too fumbly and unconfident. It ruined an otherwise decent piece, so I was pleased to find a few videos on trimming pieces while still on the bat, and fettling/thumbing off flat-bottomed pieces. I did that while I worked on getting my cylinders decent, and used those pieces to work through glaze experiments, so by the time I was throwing nicer pieces that I *wanted* to trim, I had the confidence to give it a shot and was also not ruining the pieces with ugly glaze combos. But I had to decide all that. If I had just run with the pack of beginners, I'd have had to suffer through the pinch pots and fish-shaped serving trays, and might never have gotten onto the path I wanted to be on.